Texts: Ezekiel 37: 1-14; John 11: 1-44
Carlton Erickson had a way about him. “You guys [meaning us seminary students] think you are so important, but in the end, we’re the ones that count.” As he took us on a tour of his funeral parlor, many students became absolutely pale. Some of the more curious ones opened the bottom of the casket to see if there really was space for the legs. When we left the muzak of the parlor and entered the mortuary, I heard audible gasps as we saw a body on the slab -- covered with a sheet of course, but with the bags of the innards sitting on top of the body. “Yep,” continued Erickson, “this is where it ends.”
I don’t know how many of you have been in the mortuary part of a funeral parlor, but, let me tell you, there’s no muzak there. It’s cold and sterile with the stench of formaldehyde. Some people like Thomas Lynch the funeral director writer and poet decry the trend toward cremations and believe that this comes from a desire to put the idea of death away from us. His compatriot on the lecture circuit Rev. Thomas Long opts for traditional body burial, stating that a culture that cannot care for the dead does not know how to care for the living. I would differ from him regarding that because I believe that what matters is not whether the body has a traditional burial, is cremated or donated to science but the care in our minds we have for the dead.
The earliest evidence of religious belief lies in the human treatment of the dead. From Middle Paleolithic times, some 300,000 to 500,000 years ago human beings treated the dead in a particular manner, bodies being placed with items presumed to belong to the dead person. Neanderthals seemed also to bury their dead about 130,000 years ago, bodies being placed in certain fixed positions. The first undisputed human burial dates from about 90,000 years ago with red ochre being smeared over the body and artifacts put with it. It’s clear that at some point in our evolutionary history that religious consciousness arose and human beings felt some connection with the Divine and consecrated the dead in some way.
By the time we get to the Lazarus of our story, burial practices had become highly differentiated between religions and societies. Although there are no explicit regulations from Scripture, Jewish practice at that time included a ritual washing of the corpse in an upright position, being wrapped in pure white linen and placed in a lying down position in a hewn cave; after one year, the cave was opened and the body now decomposed was cleaned once again and the bones placed in an ossuary. As an aside, this kind of burial method was also practiced in other ancient cultures, such as the Batak in Sumatra and the other Indonesian groups in Sulawesi. In modern culture, there are many sorts of religious commemorations after one year ending the official mourning period.
Now, if we go back to Lynch and his advocacy of the open casket funeral, we should note that his is a very traditional Catholic perspective. Jewish law actually prohibits viewing the body because it is considered disrespectful; obviously since embalming is forbidden and even autopsies discouraged under Jewish law and custom, an open casket would be looking into the face of death itself rather than the cleaned up and cosmeticized version of death we get with many modern funerals.
The first time I saw a dead body at a funeral was when I was six years old. Mrs. Akers -- I never knew her first name -- had been a dear older friend to my parents. There was an eerie white light behind the casket; I looked carefully inside to see if she had her fox stole with those beady little glass eyes that I had always thought were looking straight at me. Children observe the customs and habits of grown-ups more than we think.
What I observed was how much she had been loved in spite of that awful fox stole because she had helped so many people. What I also sensed, though, was that the body in the casket was a fixed up version of the person whom everyone loved. Like Jesus, when he heard the news that Lazarus had died, people wept.
So, why is it we weep if we believe in some form of life after death? How do we unbind the dead so they live in us? We all have different ways of doing that. Some keep a room or the clothing of a person as physical reminders. I kept my late husband Bob’s favorite jacket but was horrified to realize that after a period of time it didn’t have his smell but that of the mothballs I had used to preserve it.
In our modern technological age, we can keep videos and voice messages; the recording I have of my wedding back in 1962 means a great deal to me, but I listen to it on my wedding anniversary as a memory of life, not on the date of his death as a memory of tragedy. We unbind the dead in our lives in so many ways.
In the play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, playwright Rajiv Joseph has Robin Williams as the ghost of the dead tiger say, “Being dead gives you a new perspective on life.” My mind comes back to Lazarus. We really can’t imagine what being dead means to us personally. Even people who have had near death experiences can’t really imagine the experience of being dead, really, really dead because they are still alive. As one dying person once said to me, “You will lose me, but I will lose everyone, everything.”
Back to the question: How do we unbind the dead in us? It is certainly not what some call “grief management,” as if it is something impersonal and apart from us as we grieve the loss of those we love and once loved. Sometimes wonderful memories in our lives unbind the dead in us. But grief and unbinding the dead in our lives is more than sweetness and light.
It can also be full of anger and rage. In a session for widowed survivors I was leading many years ago, there was a woman who was trembling because she was afraid to express her anger and rage towards God whom she blamed for the death of her husband. Yes, in the deep recesses of our souls, we often not just ask God why something happened but shout at God full of rage. It is part of unbinding the dead.
At this point in Lent, we are journeying towards Jerusalem, knowing that the one who provided us with a new vision of God will be crucified, yet again and again. The sins Jesus died for are those of our own complicity in the evils around us. He died because he spoke out against those evils, against the complicity of leaders and people in his own time and he dies every year as we live in complicity with the same evils. It’s through the struggle that we undergo against those evils that we are redeemed just as it was for the small band of followers who accompanied Jesus in his time. We unbind the dead through our lives working for a world that truly reflects God in our lives.
Let us pray: We come to you, O God, holy and divine presence in our lives, often in fear and trepidation, uncertain about life and death. Help us to come to another place, one where we truly not just feel your presence but bring that presence to others through following the One who gave us a new vision of life. Amen.